Homophones bother me. Well, some of them do.
Here's my theory:
The ball in the basketball game is nothing like the ball in which people dance.
I'm okay with the fact that the word 'ball' is used in different ways.
However, consider the following sentences.
Santa is fairly plump around his waist. Suzy threw away her half-filled water bottle, and it was such a waste!
The spelling of waist and waste bothers me. Why are they pronounced the same? Why would different spelling be required? It bothers me that there can be multiple spellings of a word that is pronounced the same! It would make sense to have them both pronounced the same way. To people like me from a non-English speaking country, it becomes a burden to attempt at pronouncing these words. (Though I have personally lived in the US for such a long time that I'm fluent in English.) What if I pronounced knight as "k-night" with the 'k' sound distinct? I still pronounce some things incorrectly sometimes.
Every letter having one pronunciation would make a lot of people's lives easier, and that's that.
And sometimes, these things have rules in order to attempt at making these things slightly easier. However, what aggravates me even more is that there are SO many exceptions!!!! It's ridiculous! I have yet to find a language that fixes these annoying things.
Well, that's my opinion, anyway.
You should create one. A language, I mean.
ReplyDeleteAs a response: I agree, things would be much simpler. But the English language is like a person: changeable, varying, with many different layers and complications and personal tendencies (like "i before e except after c"). This makes it more likable and intriguing, just as a person is. It also gives us the ability to twist and bend the language so as to make it do what we want - to write poetry and poems, novels and letters and thoughtful blog posts. Language is the very way in which we communicated, it's what we live through - which, from one perspective, makes homophones an extreme disability because one can get confused so easily, but, on the other hand (which is, indeed, quite a deep subject - the other hand ;)), would you really want language to be a concrete, unbendable, uniform structure? If we didn't have homophones and the like, where would our flexibility be? How would we express ourselves with fluidity, even mystery, or mysticism? There are flaws and exceptions in the language - there are many. But these are the very things that allow our use of the language to be flawless.
I actually started to make a language. It took forever, though. :((
ReplyDeleteFor such a shallow mind...
No, it wouldn't be perfect. Nothing is perfect. Every language needs its quirks. But I'm just saying that English is too quirk-y for my taste. Just my opinion. :)